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An archived Hellgate: London feature. See the Hellgate Archives for more.

Feature: 1up.com Preview
Date: May 11, 2005
Source: 1up.com

From Blizzard to Flagship

As a development studio, Blizzard is many things to many people -- a group of gods to be worshipped, a company that consistently delays games, something in between, etc. What it is not, however, is unsuccessful. Its games have broken records, made parent company Vivendi Universal Games an attractive acquisition target, and established fanatical fanbases over the years. It's a juggernaut. So when a handful of Blizzard's key players left in mid-2003 to start up their own studio Flagship, people paid attention.

As it turns out, some of those people were from Namco's U.S. division who were looking to get into the PC market. "They had made the decision as a company to move into the PC space," says Flagship CEO Bill Roper. "They do arcade, they do console, they do handhelds, and they're also an entertainment company...and probably predominantly because the PC isn't big in Japan, they'd never really thought about moving on to that platform [until right around the time we were looking for a publisher]." A few weeks ago, the two companies announced a publishing deal for Flagship's first game, Hellgate: London.

Before Namco ever got involved, however, the game design started with a simple idea. "The core idea of the game [came up] literally the day after we had left Blizzard," says Roper. "Dave Brevik, Erich [Schaefer] and Max Schaefer -- which were the three guys that started what became Blizzard North -- [and I] were at Dave's house in his front room, kind of basically saying, 'Yeah, let's do another game company; what should we do?' We talked about some different ideas, and Dave at one point said, 'Alright, here we go: totally randomized RPG in first-person,' and he [put his hand down] and he hit the table. Then we do what we normally do, which is we spend about half an hour or 45 minutes trying to figure out why that's a really bad idea and shoot holes in it. After about half an hour or 45 minutes, we couldn't really figure out why we didn't like it."

Thus Hellgate: London was born. While Flagship still had nine or 10 months of setup time to put the company together in front of them, the central idea of a Diablo-style RPG in first-person stuck throughout the process. Roper is careful to note, however, that just because the game takes place in first-person, that doesn't mean it is a shooter dependent on accuracy. "Since we're building an RPG, even though it's primarily played from the first-person perspective, we don't want it to be a twitch-fest," he says. "We're doing things that have soft-targeting, or area effects, or auto-locking, to make it where your success in the game isn't determined on your physical reflexes, or the dexterity of a fourteen year old. It's all about building up a character: your level, your stats, your skills, your equipment, your items -- it's the classic RPG in that sense."

As if to prove this point, when demonstrating the game to us, Roper went with a gun that didn't need to be fired directly at an enemy -- he deliberately fired it nearby but not at an enemy so the weapon would overshoot, only to have the shot turn around in mid-air and come back to attack. Similarly, when Roper used dual fire-shooting pistols later in the demo, he shot at the ground nearby an enemy instead of at the enemy itself -- and showed that the fire attacked a large area, rather than just a few pixels on the screen. Similar to the pitch given for Full Spectrum Warrior where 'it takes place in the battlefield but you never actually pull the trigger,' Hellgate: London takes place in a first-person shooter world, but you never have to have perfect aim. It helps a bit, but isn't key to the gameplay.

Why Randomness Matters

Apart from the lack of a dependency on aiming, Hellgate also steers away from most first-person shooters by having a randomly created world. Apart from certain specific underground station areas where players can buy/sell items and meet up with other players, the game world will appear different every time you go adventuring. "The entire game is dynamically generated, except for underground stations, which are kind of like our towns, because you always want people to know where to go to buy and sell items and find NPCs for tasks," says Roper. "But any time you step out into the gameplay world to play, we create a unique version of the gameplay world for you to play in. It's kind of like Guild Wars is, or the dungeons in World of Warcraft -- there's a whole bunch of games that have done it in different degrees. The idea is that every time you go out, you get your own individualized experience, whether it's for you or your group or whoever's in there. It eliminates a lot of the downsides of the MMO environment -- where there's kill stealing, or spawn camping, or you have people of different character class areas trying to play in the same area."

"We really like the concept of how randomly generated games play," continues Roper. "They're a really good self balancing tool. If you're in an area that feels like it's too difficult, you can go back to the area you were just in and adventure in there more, but it doesn't feel like you're grinding...you're going back to an area you know is balanced for you, but at the same time, it's completely different every time you go there. So you don't have the feeling that you're just sitting there doing the same thing over and over again."

Naturally, this balance also applies to when you tackle a level with a group of players online rather than by yourself. "If you [go into a level] alone, that's going to have a different play balance than if you were in a group," says Roper. "We can dynamically change the difficulty and the number of monsters that are in there based on how many people are in your group and the levels they are and where you are in the game."

The idea of having a "random" world extends beyond just the levels -- skills, items, and even events that happen in each environment will be randomly generated as well. One weapon you pick up may provide different types of damage (there are currently five in the game: physical, fire, electrical, spectral, and poison) or allow a different number of upgrades than another of the same base type. The idea is to keep the experience fresh for players even if they will be playing though the same types of environments for an extended amount of time.

Despite all this randomness, though, story plays a key role in the experience. The basic setup is as follows: "The Hellgate is the portal that the demons have managed to open between their worlds and our, and that's their doorway between Hell and Earth. The player is trying to find some way to stop it, shut it down -- some way to negate it to stem the tide of the demons coming through."

How Animal Crossing Inspired the Game

Because of the focus on a randomly created world, Flagship has come up with the idea of "content over time" to keep their game interesting to players as time goes on. "There are two ways you can have content in a game [like this] -- one's over time and one's over geography," says Roper. "Most games do the 'over geography.' Content over geography is usually what people are kind of used to where you find new things because you travel to this new area, and that's where things are different. The content over time idea is that you can use the same setting and the same geography, but you get different events that occur there because things come to where you are."

Taking a cue from a game that's about as far away as you can get from a first-person shooter, Roper cites Nintendo's Animal Crossing as a game that shows how well this concept can work. "The first game we noticed that did that really, really well was Animal Crossing for GameCube, because basically that's what that whole game's about. It's all content over time. The guy shows up and says, 'Next Tuesday the painting salesman -- that famous artist -- is going to be in town.' And you're like 'Oooh I can get another painting from him for my house,' so you go log in on Tuesday. It was really funny. For a game that was mainly a single-player experience, you felt like you were logging in every day. 'I gotta make sure I get in, check my mail, and set out more things to get identified. Oh, that's right, and the rug salesman's going to be in town.' And things kept happening, but you never left this really pretty small play area."

In Hellgate, this idea applies to the smaller tasks that exist in the game world. While the game's story focuses on key quests that the player has to go through, there are tons of smaller tasks players can go after should they choose to do so, and these are the elements of the game that change over time. "Any time you go and talk to an NPC, they may have things they're interested in," says Roper. "If you want to help them out you can, but they aren't a part of the main world storyline. For example, you can go up to one of the shopkeeper type NPCs where you're going to buy and sell items, and he may say, 'I've had this big order come in to modify all these weapons with batteries and my supply is really low on batteries, so for every battery mod you bring me, I'm paying five times the normal price.' It's not a quest, but it's something that is a need or an interest that's a little task you can go do."

By varying these optional tasks and interactions with NPCs, the team at Flagship is looking to create a more immersive world. "[A change in the world] might be daily, it might be weekly, it might be every seven hours or something -- in single-player we run it off your clock, and in multiplayer we'll run it off a master clock. So you might go to the shopkeeper and he says, 'Oh yeah, I'm looking for these batteries.' And the next day you might come in and he says, "The Templar are planning this big raid, and they're looking to get their hands on as many Scorchers [one of the weapon types] as possible. So for every Scorcher you bring me, I'm running low on cash but I'll mod a weapon for you. I'll add a mod slot to a weapon. So now you're like, 'I've gotta keep my eyes open for that. And it's not like 'Go here and kill these wolves and I'll give you a pair of boots.' It's just like, 'Hey if you happen to come across any of these, and you get this many of them, I've got a special thing I'll give you for that."

Taking the idea from Animal Crossing a step further, Flagship will also be able to add situations like these post-release to online players. "All that stuff will be in the game when it ships, but it is also a great way that we can continue to support the game once it's already out," Roper says. "It's a much easier thing to add than having to build out for example a whole new continent to explore, or a brand new dungeon to go delve, which is what the majority of MMORPGs have to do."

The Possibility of PvP and the Future

While we haven't gotten into too many of the smaller details here, it's clear there is going to be a ton of depth to Hellgate's overall gameplay. Flagship is planning over 100 different weapon types, each fully moddable and randomized, so there will be a practically infinite number of specific weapons, for example. And to make sure that vision is executed properly, the team is shying away from including PvP as a big component to the game.

"Right now we are very focused on doing cooperative multiplayer," says Roper. "Doing co-op multiplayer against the environment, and then trying to layer in a really good PvP component is amazingly difficult. It can be done, and there have been some games that do it, but I think there are many more examples of games that do it poorly. Things that are fun to do against monsters at time are really annoying against players...we know that monsters don't care what you do to them, because they're the computer. You can slow them, stop them, throw them around, stun them, have them get hit by secondary damage they don't see coming, and it's just part of the gameplay and it's fun for the player to do all that stuff. But when it starts happening to you -- if you feel like you've been killed by circumstance and not through any means of your own skill -- people tend to really get upset about that."

"At the same time," Roper continues, "we also recognize that competitive play is really important, so we want to make sure that we build in ways where players can compete against each other, but the challenge we've kind of set for ourselves is doing that in a way that fits with the cooperative nature of the game. So we're looking at building events that are anything from individual competitions -- like timed collections quests or scavenger hunts -- to more team oriented competitions like guarding an area for a certain amount of time that gets increasingly difficult waves of monsters...things that people can do that are competitive where they can rank themselves."

That's not to say there won't be any head-to-head competition at all -- it just won't be a main focus on the development side for the time being. "We haven't totally closed our minds off to at some point probably having some kind of arena where if players just want to go in and bash on each other just to see how it is, that we might do something like that," he says. "But really our biggest focus, and certainly on the launch for the game, is making a cooperative multiplayer experience."

That approach of biting off an amount you can handle lends itself to the company as a whole, it seems, as Roper intends to keep Flagship from getting too large. "Our goal is to keep Flagship small," he says. "We want to have basically a team here. We'll probably end up growing into like a team and a half so we can work on new projects, but still have people that maintain the games that are out, but we don't really want to get huge like Blizzard ended up becoming."

As for when that means the game will hit stores, Roper doesn't want to commit to a date quite yet, only saying "not in 2005." Given Blizzard's track record with release dates, his hesitation makes sense. ["Out of the 24 full time employees we have here, I think 16 of us worked at Blizzard North together," he says.]